Musings of an Indiana born teacher living and working in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Geocaching

or Sandfly Bay Revisited

One of the things I have managed to accomplish at Columba is establishing a geocaching club. Wikipedia defines geocaching:

Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity in which
the participants use a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receiver or mobile
device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers,
called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world.A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a
logbook where the geocacher enters the date they found it and signs it with
their established code name. Larger containers such as plastic storage
containers (Tupperware or
similar) or ammunition boxes can also contain items for trading, usually toys
or trinkets of little value. Geocaching shares many aspects with benchmarking,
trigpointing, orienteering, treasure-hunting, letterboxing, and waymarking.

Over the last two months, geocaching has taken me places I probably would not have seen otherwise. Here are some photos from our Columba trip to teh Otago Peninsula.

The Columba Geocaching Crew

Back: Me, Caitlin, Kita, Angela, Alan

Front: Christina, Ryely, Ailsa, Gaby, Emma, Aicha, Crystal

One of the geocaches in Broad Bay is called Yellowhead. The land bridge to get out to the island is not for the timid.

The New Zealand Sea Lions and Fur Seals were out in force on this sunny day.

Crystal finds a seal.

Going to a beach and seeing seals and sea lions in the wild is really a cool experience. The sea lions are absolutely massive and move much quicker than one might expect. People are warned not to get within 20 m or to get between a sea lion and the water. This chap was just coming out of the water and did not mind posing for some photos. S/he then went up to the sea lion and kindly asked it to move along, taking its spot on the beach.

A blond, a redhead and a brunette walk on to a beach...

Nikita, Caitlin and Angela have been great physics students, great geocachers, and great friends to talk to during lunch. They will go far.